


What Words

by Lt_Zoe_Jebkanto, Luck_O_Tucker



Category: Star Trek Enterprise
Genre: Gen, POV First Person, Reflection
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-02
Updated: 2015-05-02
Packaged: 2018-03-26 18:35:33
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 601
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3860344
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lt_Zoe_Jebkanto/pseuds/Lt_Zoe_Jebkanto, https://archiveofourown.org/users/Luck_O_Tucker/pseuds/Luck_O_Tucker
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>What words would I now have to say to Commander Charles Tucker?</p>
            </blockquote>





	What Words

**Author's Note:**

  * For [scifijunkie](https://archiveofourown.org/users/scifijunkie/gifts).



> Even before reading Scifijunkie's "Damn Morals", (which I will do after posting this) the story's summary got me thinking about "The Cogenitor" and consequntial events...

What Words

What Words? 

What torrents of words I have wished to fling at Commander Charles Tucker!

For years, the memory of his vessel, as much as that of his name, made me want to rage, to cry, to rant! Why did our Vissian ship have to meet the one from Earth? The one called Enterprise? Why did my husband and I have to fall into conversation with its Chief Engineer? The very thought of both encounters made me shake with grief and fury! I never knew which of my emotions hurt the most. 

“Try not to think of it, Calla,” my husband said. “Try not to think of him.” 

But beneath my resigned and waiting silence, those feelings continued to batter at my aching heart and even more, at my empty womb.

If there ever had been words invented that could express even a fraction of my fury at Tucker’s audacity, I never found enough of them to ease my bitterness. 

He was a stranger to our people. What made him think he should interfere with our ways, or with the family my husband and I yearned for a chance to have? Why would Tucker suggest that our cogenitor, whose services had taken so long for us to obtain, was not well treated? Hadn’t we given it a soft, warm bed to sleep in and the most nutritious food our ship could provide? 

He said it was intelligent and that it should be talked with, should be taught, even be given the same freedoms that males and females have. We tried explaining that cogenitors make up only three per cent of our population. We must keep careful track of their actions so as to ensure their safety. We need to know where they are at all times, so they can be utilized most effectively. It would be a disservice, teaching them to read, encouraging them to question their role, to seek a future that lies out beyond the border of their responsibilities! There are no Vissians with a more important role in our society than theirs. They control the fate of our species. 

But Tucker didn’t recognize that importance. Instead, he obsessed over the idea that our cogenitor had no name. Why would it need a name of its own, when its name is that of every family on Vissia? He saw only the curiosity lighting a single pair of eyes, then he made it promises he had wishes, but no means, to keep.

Because of him, our child was lost to the cogenitor’s suicide. My heart grieved, my womb ached for that child we never had, the one who never received the name of my husband’s grandfather or my favorite aunt. That child who never received anything at all.

It was almost three years before another cogenitor became available to us. But to our surprise and delight, after only two months, we learned that we were, at last, to have the child we had been longing for! 

My pregnancy was joyously uneventful, my labor quick and easy and my delivery, a year ago now, was without complications. 

Our child has proved to be as bright and curious as I had hoped, during all the months while I grew large and sat dreaming of teaching him or her to count and to read, perhaps encourage to study engineering one day, or to travel the mysterious and beautiful stars…

And as I stand here beside its crib and look down into its bright and eagerly upturned eyes, I wonder what different words I might wish now to say to Charles Tucker.


End file.
